Mission & Meaning

School Sucks Project is a podcast, You Tube channel, and on-line community dedicated to redefining education. We promote home-education, critical thinking, peaceful parenting, personal development and better communication strategies.

What education is:
a lifelong journey of seeking and integrating knowledge, intrinsically motivated and serving the needs of the individual learnerWhat education isn't:
compulsory, institutionalized schooling

My name is Brett Veinotte, and in my 12 years of teaching, school sucks has been perhaps the most common phrase I've heard students use to describe their feelings about "public education" or more appropriately, compulsory schooling. Yet this seemingly bitter and reductive slogan is actually quite clever.

School sucks is perhaps the most accurate and astute synopsis of the system I've ever heard. The 15,000-hour process of compulsory schooling has a dramatic effect on the mind of a child. When we first enter these institutions at age six, many of our best personal attributes are already in place. We are curious, innovative, unique, creative and hopeful in ways that we will rarely be able to replicate throughout the rest of our lives. But over time, school sucks those essential attributes out of too many of us...and replaces them with predictability, obedience and apathy.

Unfortunately, for over a century this process has been referred to as "education." It isn't. Our aim is to reclaim that word, to take it back from those who wish to use institutionalized schools (at all levels) to mold impressionable minds into desirable and predictable finished products. Education is a journey by the individual, for the individual.